iNSIDER Perspective | How To Define Your Processes: Don’t Make an Electronic Version of the Same Bad Process

Welcome back everyone!

Today, iDatix iNSIDER and Business Consultant Steve Weissman joins us again. Our topic today is about automating your processes. This can be a struggle for many companies when they are adopting ECM or BPM technology because defining processes is a big component of that.

For more great content from Steve Weissman, check out his other interviews as well as his expert blog on AIIM.

Complete Transcript

Samantha McCollough: Today, iDatix iNSIDER and Business Consultant Steve Weissman joins us again. Our topic today is about automating your processes. This can be a struggle for many companies when they are adopting ECM or BPM technology because defining processes is a big component of that.

So to begin, what is the first piece of advice you would give to anyone who was looking to automate their processes?

Steve Weissman: Well, I guess the best answer and the shortest and most immediate answer to that question is, don’t do it just because you can. There are plenty of processes in organizations that really don’t work as well as they might.

Automating a bad process, all you do is get in trouble faster. That’s the most important thing.

The second most important thing, thus, is you have to take a step back and figure out which are the ones you want to do first, which are the ones that are so badly broken you want to get to but maybe not now because you have better choices available to you, more immediately.

But simply throwing technology at your business processes because you can is rarely a good idea. It’s like automate the chaos. What does that get you?

Do you find that companies often need outside help because maybe, they’re too close to the problem to effectively define and automate their own processes to the best that they can be?

Steve: Absolutely, though not always.

I don’t want people to misconstrue this line of question and answer as an ad for consultants, although I happen to be one. There are plenty of opportunities within companies for internal staff to do this job. When I say this job, what I mean is taking that conceptual step backward and taking a look at how work gets done in order to see how it might get done better.

The reason outside help often can be important is because those outside eyes aren’t predisposed to see things in certain ways because they know how things have been done for many, many years or they know that they’re own department is going to have to change so therefore they want to rig the answers in a certain direction to minimize the effect on themselves.

It’s like bringing an outside referee to run a basketball game instead of just each team contributing their coach to be a ref. It certainly can be done. It often can be done without issue. But generally thinking, that outside perspective is really important, not only to cut down on the opportunity for skewing of the results, but also there’s a wealth of experience that the outside consultant may have, things that they’ve seen that perhaps you or your staff haven’t and can bring in all that added value, as well.

What would be, besides just not automating the bad processes, what would actually be that first step that you would take to choose the right processes to begin with?

Steve: Well, in some cases it can be obvious, although, even as I say that, I smile to myself and thus to you. Because there are a lot of processes that just have run the way they’ve run for a very long time, so nobody thinks about it that much unless somebody were to come in and ask.

I always think of it as someone who plays a lot of tennis, which I do not as a matter of public safety. But people who play a lot of tennis develop tennis elbow. If it’s not really severe it’s just this ache. My elbow just aches and I just know that. I get up in the morning. It feels better during the course of the day. I’m not going to go to the doctor to say, “Oh, my elbow hurts,” because it’s not that bad. I deal with it.

At the same time, though, if I’m in for a checkup and the doctor is looking for signs of arthritis or whatever it is and he moves your arm a certain way you go, “Oh!”
He said, “Does that hurt?” “Oh, yeah. I play a lot of tennis.” “You have tennis elbow. I can help you with that.” Suddenly, you’re on the road to a cure.

I look at business processes in very much the same way that however, you’re getting your work done likely evolved as a process over time to get done the way that it currently is. A lot of times processes are first initiated unconsciously, then really just through reflect the nature of the personalities involved. Well, Fred’s really not good at details so we’re not going to give him that piece. We’ll have Ethyl do it.

Whereas from a process perspective, probably or perhaps that split of function doesn’t make sense, but the company grew up that way and it becomes institutionalized. It can take that outside eye, like the doctor wiggling your elbow, to say, “Wait a minute. There’s a better way to do this. How did that end up happening?”

Because by now, of course, Fred and Ethyl have long departed from the company and the people in those chairs right now just do things the way they do things because that’s how it’s always been done.

It really is important to look at things as objectively as possible, to do the equivalent of following a piece of paper from the time it enters your business to the time it lays to rest somewhere and to identify where does it go and who touches it and how many times and for what purpose. Look for ways to prune this so that the process is running as efficiently as possible irrespective of who it is that’s actually involved.

It’s a long answer, but does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense because not every company’s going to be the same so there never is one right answer for how to automate a process. In talking about this, I want to bring up something that I’ve been looking a lot at lately. It’s one of those semi new but not really new subjects in our field. That’s about dynamic or adaptive case management and about automating processes, the way you bring in knowledge workers so the processes can’t be automated.What is your take on that?

Are there still going to be underlying pieces of the puzzle that can be automated, that you can gain efficiencies from? What is your take on adaptive case management and the knowledge worker in unpredictable processes?

Steve: Yes, unless it’s no. It’s really the law of diminishing returns to me.

In theory, you can automate every process. Part of that automation is a function called exception handling, because there will always be things that don’t fit the pattern. What you’re really looking for are those processes that have, perhaps, the fewest number of exceptions to handle as a result of automation.

A very repetitive task can be automated to a very high degree because it tends to work the same way every time. Not that there aren’t things to kick out because they don’t fit the mold or maybe it’s an image that can’t be read properly or what have you.

Where it gets tricky with some of these other things like adaptive case management, like with knowledge management, for me there’s a spectrum there that the more human, if you will, “The more human the process becomes, or human intensive, the trickier it becomes to automate it because human beings themselves are not always predictable and consistent and mechanizable.”

I spent a good long time in and around knowledge management. I can’t even count how many years. Let’s just say it starts with 19 something. That was always one of the hardest bits about it, was how to allow people to be people and still have the process be as efficient and automatic as possible and to design interfaces and things whereby the person is dealing with the process in the way that they’re accustomed to but all this other stuff is happening right behind the interface and they don’t know it.

So, for instance, in the very early days you would have systems that would give you an interface and the vendors would very proudly tell, “Look, on the menu it says, I can do file save or I can do file save into the system.”

My point was always, “Why would you give people the choice?” Because the only place you really want the thing to be saved is into the system, so why not just have a menu that says “File save,” but you’re saving it into the system? In other words, you’re just changing the label on the menu because that’s what people are used to. And yet, behind the scenes, you have all this magic happening.
The same is true when you talk about adaptive case management where by the very definition things are going to change over time, where different variants on the particular case theme are going to crop up. You have to allow for that learning, really, to take place and that input from human beings, but you want to do it in a way that makes it as natural as possible.

From a technology perspective, to me that means a great deal of concentration on that interface. You and I are speaking right now online, through a microphone. It’s all voice. Call center applications are all voice. Voice is the most natural interface, so you and I could sit down and type emails back and forth with this very same content and yet this experience is totally different. This is more natural, and that’s what you’re looking for.

Ways to let human beings apply what they know to a process so that the process can be adjusted over time without being disruptive. At the same time, allowing people to apply what they know to each other through some of the collaboration tools, whether it’s Facebook on the outside or Yammer behind the firewall. Some way that people can find each other because it’s not just humans to the machine. It’s humans to each other.

Again, another long way to respond. You would expect nothing else, but does that answer your question?

Another question I had is do you find that companies often underestimate the amount of their processes that can be automated?

Steve: Yes, although I’m laughing because I don’t even know if I’d put it that way. Many organizations really have no idea what their processes are and that’s why I laughed. They know they have them and they think they know what their processes are and how they work, but if you ask the guy at the top of the chain and compare his answer to the gal at the bottom of the chain, and I don’t mean that in any sexist way. It could be a gal at the top, as well. You very often get a different picture of what that process is.

That can make it really hard to automate. Going back to your first question, it’s another good reason to use an outside set of eyes because they don’t have any vested interest one way or the other.

So yes, organizations underestimate what can be automated. The bigger problem is they don’t really know what they’re dealing with until somebody says, “You’ve got to sit down and figure this out before you do anything else. Then you will be able to find which ones in what order, where you’re going to get the biggest bang for the smallest buck.” That thing.
You know me. I’m all about that up front due diligence, and it’s just as critical here as everywhere else.

Are there any other final words you want to leave us with today on automating processes?

Steve: Maybe just variations on some of the themes, or a variant on some of the themes that we’ve just talked about, which is to warn people off from the very human tendency to chase after the coolest new thing that floats by. We laugh about it in consulting gigs and presentations that I give. It’s like, “Ooh, something shiny! Oh, look! There’s something new over here!” It’s really easy to get distracted because what you can do with technology is really so amazing. But you have to be sure that you’re looking at it within the frame of reference of what you’re trying to accomplish. Because you don’t know if it’s going to work for you until you know what you need it to do.

Again, I’m back to that up front due diligence, but you spend a lot of time at trade shows and conferences and briefing with vendors about their future plans and all that stuff, as I do and other consultants do. It’s easy to see how it can become a distraction. So as an organizational discipline, it’s really, really important to stay true to yourself, to understand what it is you’re trying to do and then go see how all that new stuff fits.

Use it as a way to help winnow the field, narrow the field of choices available to you for vendors or service partners, but don’t let them set the agenda for you. Don’t get distracted because they happen to have a really cool looking thing because so does the other guy. It doesn’t necessarily help you.

Samantha: Great quotes. I really appreciate you talking to us about this today. It’s always great having conversations with you like this because I always learn something new. I really appreciate your time.

Steve: It’s my pleasure.

Samantha: Thank you again everyone. Join us next time when we’re discussing another new topic to hopefully, get you thinking about some of your own processes in your own company and other ways that you can start improving your business. We look forward to seeing you then.

Steve: Bye, you all.

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